An Ode to Roses

For a flower found so abundantly across the chapters and verses of great literature, it’s fair to say so much less is written in those pages about exactly how to grow them.

But fortunately for rose lovers and growers here, East End horticulturists have plenty to say on this topic. And from the fluffy, fragrant David Austin roses in traditionally desirable shapes, to the native Rosa palustris and Rosa virginiana to the eye-catchingly big, beautiful Knock Out rose family, there’s a variety suited to nearly every kind of garden out there.

“Without roses your gardens are incomplete. They give fragrance, they give beauty, they give constant color,” said Paige Patterson, a rose enthusiast and plant ambassador at Marders in Bridgehampton. “There’s a romance to roses, but if you’re not educated and you just buy them for romantic reasons, you will be like me and you eventually will know a lot about plants because you will have killed a lot of plants.”

According to the National Garden Bureau, an Illinois-based nonprofit, there are at least 150 species of roses in the Rosaceae family, many of them native to North America. Add in human intervention to yield hybrid varieties, and the types of roses in existence number over 11,000 worldwide.

If this were “Alice in Wonderland” and roses could talk, they would say something along the lines of “pay attention to me.” In other words, Patterson said, they require steady care.

“You can’t just plant them and ignore them,” she said. “Rose growing takes a little bit of commitment, and if you don’t have that commitment, there are other things that will be more successful for you. If you’re going to put them in the ground and forget about them, like you can do with hydrangeas, you’re not going to have much success.”

She herself is proof of this. When she first started gardening, she was still working as an advertising executive and had neither enough knowledge nor free time to support the roses she planted at home in Sag Harbor.

“No one told me the truth. I bought a lot of roses and killed a lot of roses,” Patterson said. “No one told me to start with maybe two and see how you do.”

Nowadays at Marders, she offers classes just on roses to fill in the information gaps she once had for others. The next one is scheduled for Sunday, May 18, from 10 to 11 a.m.

“I’m not going to just take your money — I’m going to have a conversation with you to make sure you succeed, because otherwise it’s a mean tease,” she said.

In life, as in literature, two things can be true at once. Pam Healey, a manager and buyer who’s worked at Fowler’s Garden Center in Southampton for about 40 years, agrees with Patterson, saying that “growing roses can be very difficult, but it really is quite easy by doing the right things.”

How, then, to define “the right things?” A few basic rules apply.

For starters, Healey said, plant roses in full sun and rich, well-drained soil.

Patterson puts it this way: “Roses are happy where it’s hot and dry, like California, or cool and damp, like England, but humid and hot? Not so happy.”

Proper pruning, spacing, and ventilation are key, Healey said. Don’t be afraid to be like the Red Queen and say “off with their heads” — pruning off dead blooms will allow the plant to continue blooming all season long.

The best way to water roses is by hand; the next-best way is by drip. The worst way is sprinkler-based irrigation. Patterson says if you do take no other advice, the one bit you should heed is to “water by hand only when roses like it, because they want to be drier.”

And be willing and prepared to spray for disease at least weekly, “especially around here where we have a lot of humidity and disease is prevalent,” Healey said, and for insects “when necessary.”

Even varieties marketed as disease-resistant should be sprayed periodically, she said. “The roses do need to be coddled. You do need to spray. Even the ones they tell you are resistant to fungus — it might not be true.”

Speaking of truth, Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” would have you believe that the beauty of a rose is incredibly fleeting. But in a garden, with the proper placement and care, the opposite is true.

“Roses are super rewarding because they flower for so very long,” Patterson said, “and they’re one of the only things that flowers almost all summer long, even longer than hydrangeas.”

Linnette Roe, who’s in her fourth year as owner of the Sag Harbor Garden Center, would even go so far as to call roses “the marathon runners of the garden.”

“If you’ve done it right, you’ll have an incredible first flush in May, and June will be good,” she said. “You’ll have to work a little harder in July through October, but you can essentially have flowers all season long.”

What you can’t necessarily do is plant a rose in the heat of high summer and expect it to flourish instantly. “If you want to get roses started off on the right foot, the perfect condition is to plant them in late winter or early spring, before they leaf out,” Roe said.

When starting a rose garden, Roe advises a starter such as Bio-tone that has mycorrhizae, an underground beneficial fungus that “kind of acts like hair extensions,” she said. “They go down and get nutrients and water, attach themselves to it, and bring it back to the plant.”

Patterson says the next thing a rose gardener should put into the ground is biochar — basically an activated charcoal product “that stays in the ground and acts like a coral reef. The biochar can catch the nutrients and keep it available for the plant.”

Then, Roe says, coat the bare branches with a horticultural-grade dormant oil. “It will help control funguses and bad insects. It coats down fungal spores so they can’t proliferate or spread.”

Your rose garden’s most fervent fans will be eaters like deer and rabbits, so do what you can to mitigate them. Not even the thorns on a rose bush can deter the wildlife, Patterson says. “Roses are not something that is deer or rabbit friendly. But we don’t really have anything that’s deer or rabbit friendly anymore; there are just too many of them.”

How do you know when it’s time to call a professional for help? “When more than 25 percent of the roses are dropping leaves or suffering in some way, if the buds are not opening and blooming,” Roe said. “You may have thrips or a bacterial or fungal issue. Thrips are known for getting into the bud and eating the petals, and then the flower won’t have the energy to open.”

Healey suggests if your roses are struggling, “maybe you need to rethink your site. Maybe the soil is too wet or too poor, or maybe you’re just too busy and you don’t have enough time on your hands.”

But the payoff of a carefully tended perennial rose garden is that your roses will return the favor spectacularly, like your favorite author releasing a new bestseller year after year.

“Roses are miraculous things that can bloom for a long period of time,” Roe said. “They’re the workhorses of the garden, but you have to treat them with love.”